A clean shaven man in an SS uniform entered the room, carrying a manila folder imprinted with the words “Top Secret” across the front.
“Heil Hitler,” the officer said, as he saluted.
“Heil Hitler,” Walter dutifully replied, returning the salute.
The officer had come directly from #8 Prinz Albrecht Street in Berlin — Gestapo headquarters. Walter shivered, just thinking about it. Everyone feared the Gestapo, even himself, Germany’s most loyal servant.
As a civilian, he held no military rank and had no authority.
In actuality, he was secretly working for the Fuhrer on a most important assignment. The Gestapo, he realized, could and did send fear through everyone. Should he object to their interference, by the time news of his complaint reached the Fuhrer, the Gestapo's punishment would have already been meted out.
He understood precisely why the SS officer was standing before him today.
“So, he left work early today?” The officer spoke each word slowly and carefully, as though he were actually interrogating Walter.
Does he not realize that I want to catch Ribbentrop as much as he does?
“Yes, he did.”
“Has he ever left work early, previously?”
“No, never.” Walter fidgeted with his briefcase as he spoke.
“And… you just let him leave?”
“We are civilians. Both he and I are working diligently for the Third Reich, but he is my superior, and if he says that he has to go, then I cannot stop him.”
“Where did he say he had to go?” The officer persisted, without raising his voice — he never had to. If a person was being questioned by an SS officer, they listened carefully.
“He told me that he was meeting with another professor today. The meeting was to take place at his house.”
“But, you say that you went to his house and no one was there?”
“That’s correct.” Walter replied.
The skin along the SS officer’s strong jawline tightened in frustration. “And, I have men at his house, even as we speak, determining whether or not Ribbentrop has taken anything with him.”
Walter sat patiently in his tan leather chair, feeling like a child attending one of his own lectures; a child who had failed to demonstrate satisfactory understanding of a concept and was now to be instructed as to what was expected of him.
Someone knocked at the door.
It was probably another SS officer. No one else in their right mind would interrupt an ongoing interrogation by an SS officer otherwise.
“Yes, who is it?”
“Rutherford, Sir. Heil Hitler.” The young man, little more than a boy, in his starched SS uniform saluted.
“Heil Hitler.” The first SS officer didn’t invite the younger officer to take a seat. “Now, Rutherford, what do you have for me?”
“He’s been spotted riding his BMW south.” Rutherford struggled to disguise the pleasure of his own success.
“He’s trying to escape Berlin on his motorcycle?” His incredulity was visible. “He must know that he can’t escape Germany that easily. He must have found help. Where is he now?”
“He’s on the A9 motorway. Do you want us to bring him in for questioning?” Rutherford asked.
“No, I want you to follow him. Arrest him once he has met with his contact.”
These people have no idea! Walter was horrified that SS were going to risk Ribbentrop’s escape so that they might have a chance at catching his accomplices.
The SS officer then looked at Walter, and said, “You’d better pray that we catch this prick.”
“You have no concept of what’s at stake,” Walter replied.
Peter gripped one of the levers with his right hand. It controlled the angle of the two forward propellers. He pulled backwards on it, and then turned to the pair of levers beside it, which increased their forward thrust. The idling sound rose to a higher pitch, but nothing happened.
Franck then released their mooring lines.
The Magdalena was now floating unrestrained.
A moment later, the airship started to move forward, ever so slightly.
Peter’s hands gripped the large wooden steering wheel adeptly, it was not too dissimilar to those which might be found on a sailing ship. Like its naval counterpart, the wheel controlled an oversized rudder at the rear of the airship, allowing directional control.
A careful movement of his left hand on a somewhat smaller wheel allowed the rear four propellers to pitch the nose up, while preventing it from yawing from side-to-side. On the wall to his right, where his co-pilot Franck sat, were a number of pressure switches, valves and toggles that controlled the pressure of both helium and air, as well as the distribution of ballast.
Peter felt good to finally nose up with the pitch control wheel so that the Magdalena could reach for the sky.
It was painfully slow.
All dirigibles were.
There was nothing you could do about that. Tonight, Peter felt the slowness. He felt as though he was running from a monster, but, as if in a nightmare, his legs were stuck in the mud and he couldn’t get away fast enough.
Finally, he felt the Magdalena climb and start gaining forward speed and momentum.
With both hands fixed firmly on the steering wheel, he kept the enormous, lumbering aircraft under control. With its six engines, six propellers and filled with helium gas, whose buoyancy constantly changed depending on the temperature and atmospheric pressure, piloting the Magdalena was like a combination of flying an airplane and making a scuba dive at the same time.
“We’re just about to clear those pine trees, Franck. Once we’re over them, we should be ready to switch to flight configuration.
“Copy, that.”
Peter’s heart stopped as he heard the rapid staccato of machine gun fire.
“What the fuck is that?”
“Machine gun fire, but are they shooting at us, or at a ground target?”
His hand pulled the two levers on his left back further, this increased the speed of the rear four propellers from1450 to 1700 RPM, which was just above the maximum recommended RPMs for the advanced Daimler-Benz engines.
It seemed pointless.
The extra strain on the engines barely increased their speed at all.
Ahead of them, he could hear the sound of more gunfire.
Suddenly, the area directly in front of the pilot’s cabin lit up with sparks.
“Holy shit! We’re hit.”
“What’s our pressure?” Peter was still in control, despite the disaster. He was very glad that he had opted to use the more expensive inert gas, helium, rather than the cheaper and much more highly volatile gas, hydrogen, which had proved so fatal in the Hindenburg Disaster of 1937.
Franck looked over at the gas pressure gauges.
There were fourteen separate helium compartments within the Magdalena. Each one had its own pressure gauge and release valves to prevent explosions during air pressure changes, and separate helium cylinders to increase buoyancy if required.
“Still 5.2 millibars in all fourteen compartments.”
“Okay, copy that. Let’s check the rest of our systems to see if anything else has been damaged.”
“Everything looks all right.” Franck then started to tap the compass. “Damn. It must have knocked off our forward gyroscope.”
“Okay, we’ll have to work something out by dead reckoning.” Years of piloting had taught him to work on a problem rather than to panic over something you couldn’t change.
Because of the metal used within the gondola, an interior compass was made fundamentally useless. To circumvent this problem, the Magdalena had a mounted gyroscope at the nose of the ship.
The sound of the machine gun fire was becoming quieter with distance.